The role of Storytime Speaker is a huge deal at PAX Aus, especially since the previous two guests happened to be voice actor Erika Ishii and PlayStation legend Shuhei Yoshida. This year, the keynote duties rest with Australia’s own Julian Wilton, the Creative Director at Massive Monster. From humble beginnings making Flash games at the age of 17, Julian went on to co-found Massive Monster, the team behind the insanely popular roguelike Cult of the Lamb.
Ahead of his keynote appearance at PAX Aus 2024, I had the opportunity to chat with Julian about the future plans for Cult of the Lamb, potential adaptations that could be on the horizon, the tumultuous state of the Australian development community, and plenty more.
If you would prefer to watch our awesome interview with Julian, we’ve got you covered:
WellPlayed: To kick us off, I’ve read that you started in the industry as a teenager, making the rest of us look bad while we were fresh out of college. Can you give us a little rundown of your experience breaking into the video game development world?
Julian Wilton: Yeah, I was probably just a bit of a nerd as a kid, so I just spent too much time on the computer. I forget what game it was, but I played a game, and you could see all the source files with all the little assets and stuff. You could start changing them, and it would change your look in-game, and I thought, ooh, that’s kind of cool.
So my friend and I were like, “Right, let’s make a game.” He very quickly abandoned it, and I’ve been doing it for 15 years now.
I started off doing Flash games and doing art for Flash games. I originally wanted to do programming, but I kind of suck at it, so I started doing art. Now I do a bit of everything. I do a bit of programming and a bit of art, and I am a master of nothing, but I do it all.
But yeah, I did Flash games for five years, across about 20 games. Then I moved to desktop and console games as the old flash industry was dying, and I made The Adventure Pals, which was my first commercial game. I did a little mobile game called Unicycle Giraffe as my final uni assignment, and to just learn how to use Unity and to program. I worked on Boomerang Fu as well, which is a very fun party game. And then, yeah, then Cult of the Lamb.
WP: So you went from Flash games to console and PC, but where did Massive Monster come in? What’s the origin of the studio?
JW: Usually, with a Flash game, if you’re a programmer, you would look for an artist, or if you’re an artist, you’d look for a programmer. I was on one of the forums, and I saw Jay Armstrong, one of the other directors [of Massive Monster], who had posted that he was looking for an artist. He had made this game, and his art was actually already better than mine, but I feel like I could make similar quality. So yeah, we teamed up and worked on a game called Super Adventure Pals, a Flash platformer game about having a giraffe and pet rock.
I was 18 when I was working on that, so I was still doing other stuff. I was just going to uni and doing it on the side. Jay, afterwards, made a few other games. He’d worked with this other guy called James or Jim a few times on some games, so I think they had the idea when the industry was crashing to get together and form a company to make desktop and console games, but also Flash games if they could still get money for it.
They got together with a few other people, but it didn’t really work out for them. So because Jay was working on Super Adventure Pals and they were working on other stuff, it was a bit weird, but we got there in the end.
WP: Obviously, you found a publishing partner in Devolver Digital for Cult of the Lamb, but being a cute little sheep who’s also a cult leader is an interesting pitch. How was the pitching process for the game?
JW: It took a long time to even get to that. The original pitch [had] many other different things. You’re a god on the back of the flying whale, and you have to eat your followers, for example.
So it was always that angle, but it was just trying to figure out how to word it. We ended up wanting to make a game about starting a cult, but how do you even describe that in terms of gameplay?
You’re a sheep, you’re kind of evil, you’re kind of cute, you’re a cult leader. I think that is kind of where we ended up. I did a design degree, so a lot of what I put in is ‘how can we communicate it and make it easy to understand?’
So we got there in the end, and I think the ideation was quite strategic because Devolver is probably the best publisher of indie games, and what kind of games do they like? Something a bit weird, a bit edgy. So we’re like, ‘We’ll do that.’
WP: You’ve had an unreal success with Cult of the Lamb. With that success, what has the team learned? Have there been any changes in the team since launch?
JW: When we made the game, we didn’t even have any employees or anything like that; it was just Jay, Jimp, and myself for a long time. We had Narayana, our composer, but he’s a contractor and maybe a couple of other people closer to the launch. But yeah, we were always crunching on the game, just hustling, trying to make it, as lots of game developers do. A lot was riding on it, basically, and we learned not to do that anymore.
I think we all just burned ourselves out, working too much on it and doing these crazy hours to meet milestones. This game had to be successful, or we probably wouldn’t be making games anymore. But now we’re in a position where we have 17 people, we try to make sure everyone gets paid well and we make sure that no one’s crunching, no one’s doing overtime. And we are in a fortunate position because the game has done very well, so we can do that. We just look after ourselves and look after other people, I think that is what we’ve learned.
WP: I’d love to hear that. Have you needed to build any more shelves for all the awards the game’s been getting, or are they packed into wherever you can fit them in?
JW: Haha, they’re kind of random at the moment. They’re just around the place. I think I’ve got a few in some boxes, so I need a shelf or something.
WP: I imagine they’re just paperweights and door stops at this point.
JW: There are usually a few battles over who gets them because we’re around the world as well. Jim’s in the UK, and Jay’s in Singapore. So, yeah, we usually fight for them. But I’m trying to get them all together so we can put them in a nice little trophy case or something.
Unity I know we said we take bribes, but we meant cold hard cash.
We won their Best Desktop/Console Game! pic.twitter.com/iAMqqzx5oV
— Cult of the Lamb (@cultofthelamb) November 18, 2023
WP: A more personal question directly for you. In preparation for developing Cult of the Lamb, and you can be honest with me, did you join or create any cults of your own? And, a follow-up question: is it true that it’s more fun as a follower but more profitable as a leader?
JW: I did a lot of research into cults. What is a Cult? Because we’re selling the idea of the player fantasy of starting Cult, you have to know what that means. So, I didn’t start any cults, but, in theory, you could say I did start one through this game.
I did also buy an old church. So, yeah, things are in motion.
WP: Pivoting just slightly, if Cult of the Lamb were to spin off into something like a film or animated series, who would you like to voice the Lamb? Our own Ash Whaling thinks Alf Stewart from Home and Away would be a good pick for The One Who Waits.
JW: Yeah, Alf would be pretty good at that.
Someone suggested Michael Keaton as a Lamb character. I haven’t thought too much about it, but I’d like to get a few of those celebs who engage a bit in games. So, I feel like Elijah Wood is always doing stuff.
Someone who can be a bit evil. I think the idea is that they are cute, but when they turn, they turn.
WP: Are there plans to grow the IP in that way? Are you interested in branching out into film or doing an animated adaptation?
JW: There are lots of things in the works.
We’re in this position of privilege now, where we can do whatever we want with the IP and the brand. So, mainly, that’s just resulting in us making weird things. So, there will be some stuff announced later in the year.
But yeah, a TV show is still in the works. A lot of the writer strikes, and stuff like that made the process harder. But nothing has been officially announced yet. Hopefully, one day. We’ve got some very prospective things that could be really interesting, but I’m trying to be as vague as possible. We’ll see, keep an eye out.
I don’t think those developers are going elsewhere; they’re not going to get a different job. I think they’ll probably work on their own projects and pitch them to Big Screen and Screen Australia to get funding. If anything, there will probably just be more games popping up.
WP: Back to things that are a bit more concrete. Indie games have a pretty radical culture of crossing over with each other, as with the Cult of Lamb crossing over with Don’t Starve. Are there any recent indie titles that you’d like to see the lamb pop up in, or maybe the other way around?
JW: Yeah, we’ve got one. And we’re working on it. It’s done. Well, it’s mostly done. I probably shouldn’t tell you that one, either.
We’re always open to it. We were actually working on an Among Us one for a while and put some work into that. But it gets a little tricky because it needs to make sense in the world. We would still like to do it one day, but we were trying to figure out how it works because if an alien spaceship lands, it opens up the world a lot, and I think our writer would get quite annoyed.
We usually just do what we want and then tell our writer to figure out how it makes sense in the world. Now we’re kind of at a point where if we do things that the community doesn’t think aligns with what the game is, then we’re going to get in trouble with them as well. So we probably need to be careful with it, I think.
WP: Speaking of things that got out of hand, the social media push to add sex to the game was absolutely wild. Is that the final frontier for crowd-sourced feature pushes, or are there other more ridiculous things players have been asking for that might be in the works?
JW: It’s hard. Even with the new update, I’m like, ‘Where’s the sex? What’s going to sell it?’ That was a big push, and we kind of leaned into it, making that whole update about sins things and being naughty.
There aren’t heaps of other ones at the moment. The big one was adding in that second character. We’ve seen a lot of love for that.
But we’ve also got some ideas of potentially some little pets, or maybe there is some sort of ranching where you can get resources from other animals in other animal forms, which may or may not be in a new update we make. I cannot confirm nor deny.
We will add sex to the game if we hit 300k followers by the end of the year. pic.twitter.com/gyRrKIpEGl
— Cult of the Lamb (@cultofthelamb) November 28, 2023
WP: How have you found the reception to the new co-op update, and how did that come about in a development sense? I can’t imagine it’s as simple as throwing another player in the mix.
JW: I thought it’d be a lot easier. But every single system in the game needed to be recoded. But it goes back to the way we like to work, where we want people to be working on what they want to work on. So this update came about because one of our programmers, Antony, was just tinkering away at it on a weekend. He got it working, and he wanted to work on it. So we’re like, ‘All right, let’s make it an update.’
In terms of the reception, we were a bit concerned about it because it’s obviously not as exciting as a sex update, but we’ve seen a lot of engagement from the community and a lot of love for that second character. It’s really nice, as well, because when we were first coming up with the game, the goat was always a character there, and it’s been in the animation project for the player; it’s been a skin in there for the whole time through development.
We already have the art, so we could just turn it on. It was really nice to get that in, and I think it also opens up the world a little bit. So we’re interested to explore it more in future things we do as well.
WP: When I got the press release for the co-op update, before the announcement, I looked through some forums and comment sections, and they were all hoping it would add multiplayer to the game, so I think you made many fans happy.
JW: And we’re very, very happy to do it for them. I don’t know if we’ve officially said anything yet, but I think it’s going to be the last of our free updates for now. We have given a lot of love, and now it’s time to get some money from people.
Even with this update, we’re including very exciting paid DLC. We’ve done that with each update, but this one will be a bit different. So keep an eye on that one as well. [Julian was hinting at the Pilgrim Pack, which includes the Pilgrim story, a unique quest, new Follower forms, new outfits and new decorations]
WP: On more of a local scale, along with Massive Monster hitting it big with Cult of Lamb, we’ve seen other Australian teams do wonderful things, like Hollow Knight from Team Cherry and Moving Out from SMG Studio. However, we have also seen some notable closures, such as Samurai Punk and the indefinite pause on development from League of Geeks. Being part of the community, how do you feel that the Australian video game development landscape has changed in the past few years?
JW: It’s definitely interesting because I think we are quite different from a lot of the other areas of the world because there is a lot of government funding. So, in terms of government funding, it hasn’t really gone anywhere. If anything, more of it has been announced. What’s happened is more those kinds of studios that are trying to grow bigger end up at a point where they start needing to rely on investors and investment money. And the investment money was going crazy a while ago, and I think a few of these studios maybe had some things lined up or had prospects because it was popping for a while, and then it all just dried up. So it killed a lot of the studios as well.
When you start playing with the big boy money, it gets quite market-dependent. I think the Australian scene is still pretty okay. From some of these other closures, I don’t think those developers are going elsewhere; they’re not going to get a different job. I think they’ll probably work on their own projects and pitch them to Big Screen and Screen Australia to get funding. If anything, there will probably just be more games popping up.
WP: To round things out with why we’re chatting with you. You’ll be the guest of honour at this year’s PAX Australia, taking on the Keynote Speaker duties. What can we expect from you at PAX this year? And should we show up expecting a large-scale cult-driven sacrifice?
JW: You know, that’s a great question. I have yet to organise anything for it, we’ve got some, we’ve got some plans.
We’re hoping to fly down our main artist from Spain. We’re thinking of a draw-my-life situation, but we’ll bring in random elements and keep it fun throughout. There might be some guest appearances pop up as we’re doing it. We’ve got a lot of things planned.
I don’t know what and when we’ll be announcing things, but there may be a wedding. We’re going to throw a party, as it’s our tenth anniversary as Massive Monster. I think we’re doing some other stuff. I can remember it. But yeah, The Cult of the Lamb party we’re throwing in an old church in Fitzroy, which should be fun.
WP:Julian, thank you so much for having a chat with us today, and enjoy your afternoon.
JW: No worries. Thanks, Adam.
Julian Wilton will be the Storytime Speaker at PAX Aus 2024. He will give his keynote speech at 12pm AEST on Friday, October 11, in the Main Theatre. PAX Aus will be held from October 11 to 13 at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre.
